What more proof do Berbicians need?

Mar 28, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Three Sundays ago, Bharrat Jagdeo addressed a Berbician gathering in honour of the death anniversary of Cheddi Jagan. Jagdeo, trying to whip his devotees into a frenzy, got into a frenzy himself and told his gallery that the rulers in office are planning to rig the 2020 elections but the PPP will prevent it. At that point, there was a fanatical roar.
I addressed Berbicians in a column of March 13 in which I asked them to use common sense and do not let PPP leaders so barefacedly fool them. I asked them to think rationally in the context of elections being rigged while the PPP had state power. I argued in that column that what Jagdeo was telling them did not and cannot make sense.
Since then, former President Donald Ramotar gave an interview with the Stabroek News on the oil agreements he signed when he was President. He went on to add there would have been more contracts with oil exploration entities if the election of 2015 was not rigged. Here are his own words; “If the election wasn’t stolen from us, we would have continued along the same trajectory with the same companies, so there was nothing sinister about those signings,”
Donald Ramotar was sitting parallel to Jagdeo on the stage when Jagdeo made his chauvinistic promise to stop the 2020 poll from being rigged.
Surely, no group of humans anywhere in the world can be that foolish to believe a party when in power lost that power because the opposition rigged the election. Now that opposition is in power, how can the PPP stop the fraud when the PPP couldn’t when it was in office?
I cannot believe, and no other human should believe that Berbicians, after what Ramotar told the newspaper, are going to live in the hope that the PPP will stop election tampering and will return to power. If they are going to live in that hope, they will die unnecessarily in despair.
My adumbration here is provocative and not analytical so I will continue in the rest of this article to be provocative so I can enter a discourse with Berbicians when next I speak at a public meeting in Berbice if I ever do.
I will leave out analytical elaboration because not for a moment do I believe Donald Ramotar when he said after the 2011 results were announced that the election was tampered with. Not even for a fraction of a second, do I believe Donald Ramotar and Jagdeo that the opposition in 2015 rigged the national elections.
I need Berbicians to debate with me when I see them how is it logistically possible for the PPP to stop fraud in 2020 when it had state power and controlled the important sectors of the state edifice in 2011 and 2015 yet lost.
For the sake of argument, this is all I am asking. When the debate starts, I am not even going to mention my belief that the 2011 and 2015 polls were free and fair. My preoccupation is with their modus operandi to stop the rigging.
Again for the sake of argument, let us concede that it will be registration of underage and fictional citizens. But who did that 2015? If it was the Elections Commission and its employees, then those were the same employees in 2011. Why then didn’t they do mischief to throw the PPP out? Why 2015 and not 2011?
What Berbicians need to ask themselves is why if the PNC as a political machine is so powerful that it could steal a whole election anytime, did it wait for its leaders to age by more than ten to twelve years before it rigged the 2015 polls? Surely, Berbicians cannot be that silly to believe this nonsense.
Why didn’t the PNC leaders when they were in their early fifties not feel tempted to run Guyana at that age rather than wait until they reach age sixty and beyond to use power?
This just does not make sense in the annals of human behaviour. If humans are so obsessed with power and want to dominate a country and they can dominate it by simply tampering with the general election to declare themselves, winners why wait until 2015 when they could have done so in 1997, 2001, 2006, 2011?
In all those elections, the PPP returned to office and took hold of the presidency which by the 1980 Constitution gives the president enormous power. I would have given anything to see how PPP supporters – Rhyaan Shah, Ravi Dev, Dr. Lomarsh Roopnarine, Pandit Aksharananda, Dr. Baytoram Ramharack and others – to explain why the PNC waited until 2015.

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